Entertainment

Meebo the Web Based Chat Desktop

Meebo today announced a host of new partnerships with the likes of Talkshoe, Ustream.TV, TokBox, and Pudding Media with the aims of making voice chat, group voice calling, video and audio calling and live video broadcast available to Meebo users.

Meebo also announced the availability of an Platform API, ala Facebook, that allows you to put together a secure application for use with the Meebo chat interface, and share with the Meebo community. Doug Sherrets of VentureBeat speculated that Meebo might launch a platform last week when the company launched its new ad format.

If you haven't had a chance to check out Meebo yet, it's essentially a really slicked up chat interface, allowing you to create Meebo chat groups that are embeddable into other websites, as well as allowing you to chat from within the Meebo site and connecting you with all your various instant messaging accounts.

It's not quite my cup of tea, but it could quickly become that, depending on what the various partners do bring to the table. A lot of the folks that run in my crowd are avid users of Talkshoe and UStream, and tying their communities in with the social chatting interface of Meebo can create a lot of interesting applications of the various technologies involved. In other words, I'll go against my initial inclination to give it a review along the lines of "not quite getting what this adds to the equations." Just because group chat isn't exactly my cup of tea doesn't mean that a social network built around group chatting can't work.

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